Jealousy & Saying it Like it Is

Whoever reads the Torah portion about Joseph and his brothers can't help the heart-wrenching feeling that either he himself experienced just that in some shape or form with his own siblings, or is currently experiencing it with his or her children. Jealousy so endemic, perverse and pervasive that it can warp and distort the very social fabric, however delicate that we as parents, or that our parents tried to devise and instill within us. And so, perhaps we feel the need to enter the driver's seat, and advise Jacob; how could you do that? Don't you know that preferential treatment can tear your children asunder, erode whatever trust you tried to create? How could you give Joseph a coat the others did not get? The Talmud in fact takes that approach saying that whoever gives preferential treatment to one child over the other has planted the seeds of mistrust that can not but germinate and well up later in the form of envy that can little be repaired. 

Why then did Jacob fail so miserably? It is hard to not on the one hand empathize with Jacob, but on the other, also ask why he didn't see the writing on the wall. Like my grandfather likes to quip, "Didn't he learn from last year? Last year we read that he did exactly the same thing!" 

In this brief entry I'd like to offer greater complexity as to exactly how delicate the tenor of the relationship Jacob had with his sprawling family was. Jacob had only one wife, Rachel. Now, I know the text says otherwise, but in Jacob's own voice, one - and only one - was the number of wives he had. In the words of Jacob himself, as quoted by Judah in his attempt to extricate his youngest brother Benjamin from Joseph's unforgiving grasp: "As you know, my wife bore me two sons. But one is gone from me, and I said: he was certainly ripped asunder by a beast! And I have not seen him since."

Judah, in using Jacob's own words, conveys the dreaded truth, theretofore undivulged: All along the seeds of distrerust were sowed because the brothers thought that Joseph was insidiously manipulating their father to give him preferential treatment, dreams of his own doing, crafting and invention, royal garments that would place him on a pedestal over inferior siblings - and lo and behold, Joseph in his remarkably perspicacious way forced Jacob to once and for all convey the truth to his sons. Rachel was my only wife; you were not my full-fledged children, but rather I had one wife, who was not your mother. "My wife bore me two sons." My wife, Rachel - not Leah - was the only matriarch, my true love; Leah was forced upon me, connivingly, deceptively, and I never placed my love in her bosom, she was never mine - Rachel was mine, and not your mother.

The statement was a very harsh one, especially if you were a son living in the house of Jacob with the illusion that you were equally loved, cared about and on equal footing with your brothers from the favored wife. It was one, though, that Joseph forced Jacob to make, that was at the heart of the future of the family of Jacob and the children of Israel, then and for all future generations. It would precede the crafting of the division within the ranks of a nation of priests, but one in which some, namely Aharon's sons would actually serve as priests, other Levites, other priests, others officers of thousands, others of hundreds, and others of but two hand-worths, but ten men. It would be a nation that needed to resolve these deep-seeded divisions, and it was through this process of clarification, however wrenching, that enabled Judah, the son of the less-favored wife to rise to kingship and royalty, surmounting all of his other siblings, rising to the occasion, and taking the responsibility for saving Benjamin, the son of the most-loved wife, to show that true promise was the fruit of one's labors, and not one's privileged birth and conception.